This is a communication with a moderator of a forum over some recent censorship.
Hello __, hope you are well.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
No one is obligated to agree with everything I say. The free exchange of ideas is something that must be fought for on a regular basis even in free and democratic countries.
I note with dismay that even my copies of the posts on this thread have been removed from my profile. I am unable therefore to review them any longer to find the error of my ways.
I have always been a staunch supporter of Skin Cell Forum. I have told hundreds of people of the group. I am also a patriotic individual in spite of my rights sometimes being abridged by bureaucrats who have the force of law behind them... sometimes laws or policies which I have taken issue with. It is only resistance to tyranny that prevents it. It is a duty.
I am not a revolutionary who believes that the entire fabric of the social contract needs to be destroyed so that we can start fresh. Anarchy is no solution. We must improve things, not destroy everything and start fresh.
You may argue that you changed but a single word. I responded responsibly, reasonably gently, but with some vigor, entirely appropriate to the situation.
What happened next? The entire thread was removed. Why? Because it was making an addict uncomfortable with her addiction. It could well have had impact on other lurking addicts. We will never know. This particular addict is very probably beyond my help or anyone else's.
I do not fault Nick for making his comments. I applaud that. None of you have any obligation to agree with me. All of you can get on with your disagreements with me in an open forum. We will all grow in that kind of interchange. That is what the free exchange of ideas is all about.
Instead, you made my comments all disappear. And you sent a message to the addict as well. This wretched lady is in extreme distress and is bringing the greatest bulk of it on herself. She needs serious help. She does not need people feeding her Munchhausen Syndrome by giving her hugs and commiseration for ongoing and repeated failure and procrastination.
That is what most of you are doing. In most cases, a supportive attitude is a really excellent tool to help people and if you once again take a close look at my posts you will see that two thirds of them were congratulatory and extremely supportive.
What you have done here amounts to a Star Chamber Proceeding. The censorship of but a single word was responded to in a civil and appropriate way. The response was not addressed in any way.
Instead, you packed up the entire thread and locked it in a box which will never be opened again or ever see the light of day, as far as I can tell.
It is chilling __. It is wrong. What can it hurt to redact a single word? It opens the door to capriciously and dictatorially eliminating an entire quite useful thread a day or two later.
Look over those posts carefully. I tried on numerous occasions to simply withdraw. The addict herself said "No, don't do that. I came here for help." Then later she complained that my help was mean, uncompromising. You ALL enabled her to continue her addiction entirely without impediment "until she is ready." You sharply reduced her chances of success.
But worse, all the other addicts lurking and wishing to quit no longer have this reference material. You have kept the peace at considerable cost in my opinion.
It does not mean I won't be your friend or a friend to the other moderators who have joined you in this decision. It just means my friends sometimes err. So do I.
I did not make these remarks in the Rant and Rave section. I made them to you, someone who knows with certainty that I practice what I preach when it comes to censorship.
I present choices. I say "I can publish this and respond to it. Or I can simply delete it. You are the author. What do you want me to do?"
That is the only editorial latitude I employ on my blog.
Anthropositor
(I got a letter back today which assures me that the matter will not be in limbo forever... and that __ would have preferred never to have gotten involved with this controversy. So, who knows? Perhaps one day soon the thread will return to its' previous position and be unlocked so that people can decide for themselves based on the facts.)
As a later final edit, I would like to say I hold no ill will toward this moderator or the moderating team, and that even as this was being posted here, the moderator was doing the job that needed to be done and doing it pretty well I might add. Moderators are peacekeepers. I am a rather strong willed free thinker. I do shake things up now and then. I do it purposefully and in a good cause in almost all cases. (Sometimes I might get a little exasperated and go a bit further than makes everyone entirely comfortable.)
No permanent harm was done here. Good may have been done for a lot of people. Even the addict may have ultimately been helped in some way. I hope so.
About Me
- Anthropositor
- Deep South, United States
- Consultant, inventor, mentor, chess coach,. Current projects involve No Till Farming and staving off blindness due to cataracts among other projects. I also do confidential ghost writing (without taking any published credit. My current blindness makes me put this on hold for a while. I should have one eye working again in about four months. Fact, fiction, all subjects considered. I have heard My daughter Jennifer is alive. I would love it if she were to contact me here. I understand she would like to know me. I have sent a message by circuitous route. I can only hope. My posted Email works as well. We have four decades to catch up on.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Monday, March 12, 2007
Preventing Viral Infections
HOW TO PREVENT COLDS, INFLUENZA, SARS, H5N1 (Avian Flu) AND OTHER AIRBORN VIRAL DISEASES.This same procedure also reduces the affects of airborn allergens by 50% or more.This is not a speculative idea. It has been tested since 1984. It works.
But knowing how is not the central feature. Doing it is. I started teaching the method in 1990. The earlier six years was the time of testing. Now thousands of people are successfully doing it and the numbers are going up faster each year. Do let us know your experiences with it.In 1984 when I was in my early forties, I had, many years previously, lost the lower lobe of my right lung, due to Army injuries, an early tobacco addiction, and frequent pneumonias. This resulted in bronchiactasis, a distention of the alveoli in the lungs, allowing the stagnation of mucossal secretions and developing fertile ground for infected pockets to develop in my lungs which could ultimately be life-threatening if I kept coming down with frequent colds, flu and pneumonias.
Having quit smoking during the space program back in the 1970's was very beneficial to my overall health, but my respiratory system (my weakest link) was still on the verge of killing me at any point in time that an opportunistic infection took hold.Had I not developed this prophylaxis, I would very likely have died in the 1980's.
Since then, many thousands of people have learned how to do the procedure. My calculations indicate that a much smaller number, on the order of four or five thousand people do it regularly and consistently, reaping the maximum benefit.The sad truth is that most people will not incorporate even a simple two-minute procedure into their daily hygiene routine. Even in the SARS crisis of a few years ago and with the potential for an H5N1 (avian Flu) pandemic still threatening, the numbers of people who actually get into the firm habit of doing the procedure regularly, on a daily basis, do not exceed a third of those taught. That is sad indeed.
Even the fact that THE PROCEDURE ALSO CUTS ALLERGIC RESPONSES TO AIRBORN ALLERGENS BY HALF has not increased those numbers. I did not begin teaching large numbers of people outside my circle of family and friends until 1990. By the mid-nineties, I had heard from a great many allergy-prone individuals, of this serendipitous side-effect. What a pleasant surprise!But now, without further preamble, here is what you do:
While in the shower, take a couple of Q-tip style cotton swabs, saturated with (nothing but) clear warm water. NO SOAP OR ANY OTHER LOTION ON THE SWABS. Swab the nasal passages as high as you can comfortably reach. Do this gently but be thorough. I rinse the swabs perhaps a half dozen times during this swabbing. The purpose here is to clean out the great bulk of the detritus. You are only going up perhaps an inch or an inch and a quarter on each side. You are not trying to reach the brain-pan with the swabs. If the swabs won't go so far up, not to worry. It's going to work anyway. Now, most of the accumulation of debris and the populations of the indigenous organisms in the nasal passages have been largely eliminated. This was step 1.
After drying off, lay down on the bed with some fresh cooking oil of your choice and some fresh new swabs. You can use corn oil or safflower or rapeseed (canola) or olive oil. If you are allergic to peanut oil, DON'T use peanut oil. We have been talking about coconut oil. I had never used it, assuming that it had a strong coconut smell. I was not correct. Coconut oil is now at the top of the list of approved oils for this procedure. But there is good reason not to use other more highly aromatic oils.
There are two separate olfactory apparati working in the nose. Our ordinary sense of smell, which we are all familiar with. The other sense, which most of us never become consciously aware of, is governed by the vomeronasal organ. The function of this organ is sensing special aromas, pheremonal in nature. These scents are delivered to entirely different areas of the brain than the other smells we perceive. It is important not to interfere with the functions of this organ since it is so closely associated with our instincts, and subtle social behaviors, and we don't want to mess up the various elements involved. The procedure outlined here does not adversely impact the function of the vomeronasal system.
In any case, you are now laying on your back on the bed, have dipped the swabs in the vegetable oil of your choice, and are now swabbing your nasal passages just as far as you did with the water swabs when you were in the shower. You are now coating the nasal membrane, which has already been moisturized with the only real moisturizer there is. Water. You have now covered this pre-moistened surface with an oil sheen which will help prevent the moisture from being evaporated away by the cold desiccated air in the same way that chap stick prevents your lips from chapping.
Let's look at the nasal membrane with a little flashlight... Notice how red it is, particularly that portion which is hardest to observe, the narrow channel just below the bridge of the nose. It is even brighter red than the surrounding areas of nasal membrane. It is such a bright red because you are seeing the blood through the membrane. This is where the viruses most often make their illegal entry into your bloodstream.
Notice also the little cilia-like hairs which are so effective as filters of the larger particles in the air we breathe.I usually tell people that it is not generally a good idea to snort anything back further in the nasal passage. This is an exception to that. Your nose has been pretty thoroughly cleaned. It is still far from sterile, but the jungle of organisms are mostly gone. You have now coated the moist membrane and the tiny hairs with the oil, but if the oil gets up a bit further than the swabs have reached, so much the better.
What time of year do respiratory viruses occur? During colder, more variable weather. Those times when your lips are likely to chap. Why do your lips chap? You are frequently going into cold exterior environments with very dry desiccated air, contrasting from the moist interior environments. We do this often during the fall and winter. We notice the chapping of our lips because we flex them continuously by talking, and the cracks which develop are very large because of the flexing. The same thing is happening to the nasal membrane. The fissures are, by comparison to the lips, microscopic. Even so, to a virus particle, these membrane fissures are like the Grand Canyon.
VIRUSES CANNOT REPLICATE IF THEY DO NOT FIRST MAKE ENTRY INTO THE BLOODSTREAM, INVADE OUR INDIVIDUAL CELLS, SET UP THE CELLULAR MANUFACTURING APPARATUS WITH THE VIRAL BLUEPRINT AND TURN THE PLACE INTO A VIRAL FACTORY.
OK let's review:
Step 1. Cleanse the nasal passages with swabs saturated with clear, fresh water.
Step 2. Lay on the bed and swab passages with vegetable oil. NOT Vaseline, NOT mineral oil, NOT 10-30 Motor oil, NOT glycerin, NOT dimethylpolysiloxane. JUST VEGETABLE OIL that you are not allergic to.
Step 3. Wipe your nose. That is to say, remove the excess oil from the eighth inch or so of the vestibular area of the nasal passage until no more oil is coming out.
Step 4. Congratulate yourself for remembering to do it every day.
Step 5. If you have health care providers, show them this. Tell them you are doing it. Answer any questions they might have or refer them to me for any further clarification that might be required.
Step 6. Carefully teach others how to do it or let them read this.
Step 7. There is no step seven.
One final thing. When to do it. Do it every day that you are going to be exposed to other people. Do it before you go out into the world. Not before you go to bed at night.
For allergic responses, do it before you are going to be exposed to high concentrations of allergens, like vacuuming the carpets, mowing the weeds or raking the leaves. The allergic responses will be abated by more than half in severity, thus reducing sharply the medications you need. Respiratory viral disease will be eliminated in terms of symptomatically apparent disease. You are not living in a bubble or scrubbing your hands every 10 minutes or refusing to shake hands like Howard Hughes. You are just living a much healthier life.
Continue to do the other prudent things like washing your hands, getting proper nutrition and adequate rest.Please do it for yourselves and let us know here how it worked out for you. To your health!
(This will return to the top of the pile every few months. Who reads archives?)
But knowing how is not the central feature. Doing it is. I started teaching the method in 1990. The earlier six years was the time of testing. Now thousands of people are successfully doing it and the numbers are going up faster each year. Do let us know your experiences with it.In 1984 when I was in my early forties, I had, many years previously, lost the lower lobe of my right lung, due to Army injuries, an early tobacco addiction, and frequent pneumonias. This resulted in bronchiactasis, a distention of the alveoli in the lungs, allowing the stagnation of mucossal secretions and developing fertile ground for infected pockets to develop in my lungs which could ultimately be life-threatening if I kept coming down with frequent colds, flu and pneumonias.
Having quit smoking during the space program back in the 1970's was very beneficial to my overall health, but my respiratory system (my weakest link) was still on the verge of killing me at any point in time that an opportunistic infection took hold.Had I not developed this prophylaxis, I would very likely have died in the 1980's.
Since then, many thousands of people have learned how to do the procedure. My calculations indicate that a much smaller number, on the order of four or five thousand people do it regularly and consistently, reaping the maximum benefit.The sad truth is that most people will not incorporate even a simple two-minute procedure into their daily hygiene routine. Even in the SARS crisis of a few years ago and with the potential for an H5N1 (avian Flu) pandemic still threatening, the numbers of people who actually get into the firm habit of doing the procedure regularly, on a daily basis, do not exceed a third of those taught. That is sad indeed.
Even the fact that THE PROCEDURE ALSO CUTS ALLERGIC RESPONSES TO AIRBORN ALLERGENS BY HALF has not increased those numbers. I did not begin teaching large numbers of people outside my circle of family and friends until 1990. By the mid-nineties, I had heard from a great many allergy-prone individuals, of this serendipitous side-effect. What a pleasant surprise!But now, without further preamble, here is what you do:
While in the shower, take a couple of Q-tip style cotton swabs, saturated with (nothing but) clear warm water. NO SOAP OR ANY OTHER LOTION ON THE SWABS. Swab the nasal passages as high as you can comfortably reach. Do this gently but be thorough. I rinse the swabs perhaps a half dozen times during this swabbing. The purpose here is to clean out the great bulk of the detritus. You are only going up perhaps an inch or an inch and a quarter on each side. You are not trying to reach the brain-pan with the swabs. If the swabs won't go so far up, not to worry. It's going to work anyway. Now, most of the accumulation of debris and the populations of the indigenous organisms in the nasal passages have been largely eliminated. This was step 1.
After drying off, lay down on the bed with some fresh cooking oil of your choice and some fresh new swabs. You can use corn oil or safflower or rapeseed (canola) or olive oil. If you are allergic to peanut oil, DON'T use peanut oil. We have been talking about coconut oil. I had never used it, assuming that it had a strong coconut smell. I was not correct. Coconut oil is now at the top of the list of approved oils for this procedure. But there is good reason not to use other more highly aromatic oils.
There are two separate olfactory apparati working in the nose. Our ordinary sense of smell, which we are all familiar with. The other sense, which most of us never become consciously aware of, is governed by the vomeronasal organ. The function of this organ is sensing special aromas, pheremonal in nature. These scents are delivered to entirely different areas of the brain than the other smells we perceive. It is important not to interfere with the functions of this organ since it is so closely associated with our instincts, and subtle social behaviors, and we don't want to mess up the various elements involved. The procedure outlined here does not adversely impact the function of the vomeronasal system.
In any case, you are now laying on your back on the bed, have dipped the swabs in the vegetable oil of your choice, and are now swabbing your nasal passages just as far as you did with the water swabs when you were in the shower. You are now coating the nasal membrane, which has already been moisturized with the only real moisturizer there is. Water. You have now covered this pre-moistened surface with an oil sheen which will help prevent the moisture from being evaporated away by the cold desiccated air in the same way that chap stick prevents your lips from chapping.
Let's look at the nasal membrane with a little flashlight... Notice how red it is, particularly that portion which is hardest to observe, the narrow channel just below the bridge of the nose. It is even brighter red than the surrounding areas of nasal membrane. It is such a bright red because you are seeing the blood through the membrane. This is where the viruses most often make their illegal entry into your bloodstream.
Notice also the little cilia-like hairs which are so effective as filters of the larger particles in the air we breathe.I usually tell people that it is not generally a good idea to snort anything back further in the nasal passage. This is an exception to that. Your nose has been pretty thoroughly cleaned. It is still far from sterile, but the jungle of organisms are mostly gone. You have now coated the moist membrane and the tiny hairs with the oil, but if the oil gets up a bit further than the swabs have reached, so much the better.
What time of year do respiratory viruses occur? During colder, more variable weather. Those times when your lips are likely to chap. Why do your lips chap? You are frequently going into cold exterior environments with very dry desiccated air, contrasting from the moist interior environments. We do this often during the fall and winter. We notice the chapping of our lips because we flex them continuously by talking, and the cracks which develop are very large because of the flexing. The same thing is happening to the nasal membrane. The fissures are, by comparison to the lips, microscopic. Even so, to a virus particle, these membrane fissures are like the Grand Canyon.
VIRUSES CANNOT REPLICATE IF THEY DO NOT FIRST MAKE ENTRY INTO THE BLOODSTREAM, INVADE OUR INDIVIDUAL CELLS, SET UP THE CELLULAR MANUFACTURING APPARATUS WITH THE VIRAL BLUEPRINT AND TURN THE PLACE INTO A VIRAL FACTORY.
OK let's review:
Step 1. Cleanse the nasal passages with swabs saturated with clear, fresh water.
Step 2. Lay on the bed and swab passages with vegetable oil. NOT Vaseline, NOT mineral oil, NOT 10-30 Motor oil, NOT glycerin, NOT dimethylpolysiloxane. JUST VEGETABLE OIL that you are not allergic to.
Step 3. Wipe your nose. That is to say, remove the excess oil from the eighth inch or so of the vestibular area of the nasal passage until no more oil is coming out.
Step 4. Congratulate yourself for remembering to do it every day.
Step 5. If you have health care providers, show them this. Tell them you are doing it. Answer any questions they might have or refer them to me for any further clarification that might be required.
Step 6. Carefully teach others how to do it or let them read this.
Step 7. There is no step seven.
One final thing. When to do it. Do it every day that you are going to be exposed to other people. Do it before you go out into the world. Not before you go to bed at night.
For allergic responses, do it before you are going to be exposed to high concentrations of allergens, like vacuuming the carpets, mowing the weeds or raking the leaves. The allergic responses will be abated by more than half in severity, thus reducing sharply the medications you need. Respiratory viral disease will be eliminated in terms of symptomatically apparent disease. You are not living in a bubble or scrubbing your hands every 10 minutes or refusing to shake hands like Howard Hughes. You are just living a much healthier life.
Continue to do the other prudent things like washing your hands, getting proper nutrition and adequate rest.Please do it for yourselves and let us know here how it worked out for you. To your health!
(This will return to the top of the pile every few months. Who reads archives?)
Saturday, March 10, 2007
A Letter To the Eye Surgeon
Dear Dr. B____,
We have known each other for perhaps twenty minutes total. Half exam and half short orientation. Three different technicians took ultrasound readings of the axial length of my eye because of conflicting results. Since the ultimate success of the surgery depends in part on the accuracy of these readings, I can only hope that the conflicting figures have not been averaged, which would of course incorporate error into the measurement.
I have looked at some of the less agreeable outcomes that some patients have reported (with other doctors). Some of them were due to unfortunate and perhaps unforeseeable complications. Others were perhaps caused by institutional, assembly-line practices.
But I kept noticing that many of these stories had a large factor in common. The patients themselves remained pretty oblivious about the details. They didn’t know what was happening and pretty much left all the details up to the doctor, just having hope and faith that everything was going to come out all right. I suppose that it is convenient for the various professionals and institutions involved, because most patients are not really well equipped to sort out many of the details, but such ignorance has to play a role in the results. I do not intend to be a party to anything going amiss here.
I did not have the opportunity to see the orientation videotape because the player was broken. I elected not to make another 140 mile roundtrip to see it. But I am not just leaving things up to fate. I am learning whatever I can even in our short time frame. Surgery is scheduled in two weeks. I will make sense of each enigma or potential problem that might arise before then, or we will reschedule if necessary.
Two things struck me about the sample implant that you showed me. It was very small in diameter, nowhere near the size of the clouded lens you are removing. This led me to wonder about the scattered unfocused light entering the eye around the smaller periphery of this lens and what effect that might have on such things as glare in night-vision after the procedure. And even though most lenses today filter the UV light that goes through them, what about the unfocused UV light that gets in around this smaller lens edge? It strikes me that scattered light could be playing a part in difficulties such as glare in night vision.
I presume that the central reason for the small size of the lens is the reduction of the size of the incision required for insertion. I am certainly in favor of that. But glare and haloes still seem to be quite a significant problem for some people and no one seems to know exactly why.
Another thing that I noticed is that there were two haptics, attached at 180 degree points of the model you showed me. This was counter-intuitive for me. From a stability standpoint, I would have thought that three haptics or even four would have been the number. I am also interested in knowing more about the interface between the haptics and the lens and how exactly the haptics anchor to the zonules and other tissues at the edge of the capsular cavity within the eye and what sort of changes occur in the tissue to accommodate the points of the haptics.
You mentioned the possibility of a secondary cataract developing after surgery which might need to be addressed later. If memory serves, you indicated a high probability that this would occur.
What we are dealing with now is a nuclear cataract of the lens itself. What we may have to deal with later would be a “posterior sub capsular “ cataract which develops frequently as a postoperative complication after the correction of the original problem, but can wind up being just as severe as the original. Do I understand that correctly?
The question occurs to me: Is there some clinically significant reason that the YAG laser procedure to correct this condition later, could not be done at the time of the original cataract surgery to prevent the problem from developing? It strikes me that you are already in the eye and removing the debris of the disintegrated lens. The debris of the laser procedure is also a consideration. But apparently the YAG lasering is usually done when there is no surgical procedure underway and therefore the resulting debris remains. Would it not be wise to do it when you are already in there slurping up the lens? This would certainly reduce the likelihood of this very common secondary cataract complication.
Another potential complication you touched upon had to do with the implant falling through a rupture in the posterior membrane and coming to rest on the retina. If memory serves, another specialist would quickly be called in to deal with this quite dangerous problem.
Indulge me for a moment while I brainstorm. Perhaps not too much can be done to prevent it but would it not make good sense if such a rupture were to occur, to prevent the lens from dropping through all the way down to the retina? It strikes me that such a falling lens must float down through a gel-like vitreous fluid until it reaches the retinal plane and comes to rest. I do not know how much time elapses, but it is not instantaneous. My guess is it takes ten seconds or more, and that the very worst spot for this fallen lens to come to rest is on the macula or on the fovea.
It also appears that the “natural” or “usual” or “conventional” or “accepted” position of the head during this operation is for the head to be pointing directly face up, placing the macula gravitationally directly under where the lens will fall if it breaks through the membrane. If there is even a short time between breaking through the membrane and the lens coming to rest, would it not be prudent to immediately reposition the patients head so that the lens would be more likely to come to rest in a peripheral area of the interior of the eyeball rather than the retinal surface?
You mentioned a brand or two and some materials which I did not write down or remember. We did not go into any detail about the actual structure of the lens, so I am going to take that up from the perspective of what would appear to have the greatest potential for success in my situation from my current perspective of limited knowledge.
If I refer to one particular brand or other, I do not mean to imply that I have “locked on” to that brand or even that it will be my preference when all facts are in. It just means that it seems from my perspective to have a lot of favorable things going for it. It is, after all, the critical component.
Another consideration is the corrective design of the intraocular lens. I am already monocular by habit and inclination, so I could easily live with it if the correction was very good at one extreme but less than perfect at the other. But lenses have improved markedly in the past few decades. I see no reason not to employ these improvements if possible. Both distant and close-up vision are important to me.
As I understand it, the choices I have are as follows. A single vision lens. A “bifocal” lens. A multi-focal lens. I am interested in a multi-focal accommodating lens.
I am interested in blue-blocking UV filtering as well.
Could you tell me more about the lenses that you currently use which meet these criteria?
As to stitches. Are they usually used in this operation? What is the usual length of the incision? If stitches are involved, are they self absorbing or do they need to be removed later?
Now as to anesthesia. I don’t recall our discussing it. It is my understanding that these operations can be done with topical anesthetic drops or with injections, which carry substantial additional risks, along with making the eyeball more fixed in position during the operation. What will be the game plan in this case?
And last, The manufacturer and the model and type of the lens in prospect may be of some interest from a financial standpoint. Some of the newer multi-focal accommodating lenses are not fully covered by insurers. Others are. I want to be sure that I am on the same page as my insurance provider before the operation.
Oh, and thank you for going out of your comfort zone on that prescription. I know I took you out of your specialty. You dealt with it and double checked what you were doing. That's one of the things I want in a doctor.
Cordially,
H.C.Benson
We have known each other for perhaps twenty minutes total. Half exam and half short orientation. Three different technicians took ultrasound readings of the axial length of my eye because of conflicting results. Since the ultimate success of the surgery depends in part on the accuracy of these readings, I can only hope that the conflicting figures have not been averaged, which would of course incorporate error into the measurement.
I have looked at some of the less agreeable outcomes that some patients have reported (with other doctors). Some of them were due to unfortunate and perhaps unforeseeable complications. Others were perhaps caused by institutional, assembly-line practices.
But I kept noticing that many of these stories had a large factor in common. The patients themselves remained pretty oblivious about the details. They didn’t know what was happening and pretty much left all the details up to the doctor, just having hope and faith that everything was going to come out all right. I suppose that it is convenient for the various professionals and institutions involved, because most patients are not really well equipped to sort out many of the details, but such ignorance has to play a role in the results. I do not intend to be a party to anything going amiss here.
I did not have the opportunity to see the orientation videotape because the player was broken. I elected not to make another 140 mile roundtrip to see it. But I am not just leaving things up to fate. I am learning whatever I can even in our short time frame. Surgery is scheduled in two weeks. I will make sense of each enigma or potential problem that might arise before then, or we will reschedule if necessary.
Two things struck me about the sample implant that you showed me. It was very small in diameter, nowhere near the size of the clouded lens you are removing. This led me to wonder about the scattered unfocused light entering the eye around the smaller periphery of this lens and what effect that might have on such things as glare in night-vision after the procedure. And even though most lenses today filter the UV light that goes through them, what about the unfocused UV light that gets in around this smaller lens edge? It strikes me that scattered light could be playing a part in difficulties such as glare in night vision.
I presume that the central reason for the small size of the lens is the reduction of the size of the incision required for insertion. I am certainly in favor of that. But glare and haloes still seem to be quite a significant problem for some people and no one seems to know exactly why.
Another thing that I noticed is that there were two haptics, attached at 180 degree points of the model you showed me. This was counter-intuitive for me. From a stability standpoint, I would have thought that three haptics or even four would have been the number. I am also interested in knowing more about the interface between the haptics and the lens and how exactly the haptics anchor to the zonules and other tissues at the edge of the capsular cavity within the eye and what sort of changes occur in the tissue to accommodate the points of the haptics.
You mentioned the possibility of a secondary cataract developing after surgery which might need to be addressed later. If memory serves, you indicated a high probability that this would occur.
What we are dealing with now is a nuclear cataract of the lens itself. What we may have to deal with later would be a “posterior sub capsular “ cataract which develops frequently as a postoperative complication after the correction of the original problem, but can wind up being just as severe as the original. Do I understand that correctly?
The question occurs to me: Is there some clinically significant reason that the YAG laser procedure to correct this condition later, could not be done at the time of the original cataract surgery to prevent the problem from developing? It strikes me that you are already in the eye and removing the debris of the disintegrated lens. The debris of the laser procedure is also a consideration. But apparently the YAG lasering is usually done when there is no surgical procedure underway and therefore the resulting debris remains. Would it not be wise to do it when you are already in there slurping up the lens? This would certainly reduce the likelihood of this very common secondary cataract complication.
Another potential complication you touched upon had to do with the implant falling through a rupture in the posterior membrane and coming to rest on the retina. If memory serves, another specialist would quickly be called in to deal with this quite dangerous problem.
Indulge me for a moment while I brainstorm. Perhaps not too much can be done to prevent it but would it not make good sense if such a rupture were to occur, to prevent the lens from dropping through all the way down to the retina? It strikes me that such a falling lens must float down through a gel-like vitreous fluid until it reaches the retinal plane and comes to rest. I do not know how much time elapses, but it is not instantaneous. My guess is it takes ten seconds or more, and that the very worst spot for this fallen lens to come to rest is on the macula or on the fovea.
It also appears that the “natural” or “usual” or “conventional” or “accepted” position of the head during this operation is for the head to be pointing directly face up, placing the macula gravitationally directly under where the lens will fall if it breaks through the membrane. If there is even a short time between breaking through the membrane and the lens coming to rest, would it not be prudent to immediately reposition the patients head so that the lens would be more likely to come to rest in a peripheral area of the interior of the eyeball rather than the retinal surface?
You mentioned a brand or two and some materials which I did not write down or remember. We did not go into any detail about the actual structure of the lens, so I am going to take that up from the perspective of what would appear to have the greatest potential for success in my situation from my current perspective of limited knowledge.
If I refer to one particular brand or other, I do not mean to imply that I have “locked on” to that brand or even that it will be my preference when all facts are in. It just means that it seems from my perspective to have a lot of favorable things going for it. It is, after all, the critical component.
Another consideration is the corrective design of the intraocular lens. I am already monocular by habit and inclination, so I could easily live with it if the correction was very good at one extreme but less than perfect at the other. But lenses have improved markedly in the past few decades. I see no reason not to employ these improvements if possible. Both distant and close-up vision are important to me.
As I understand it, the choices I have are as follows. A single vision lens. A “bifocal” lens. A multi-focal lens. I am interested in a multi-focal accommodating lens.
I am interested in blue-blocking UV filtering as well.
Could you tell me more about the lenses that you currently use which meet these criteria?
As to stitches. Are they usually used in this operation? What is the usual length of the incision? If stitches are involved, are they self absorbing or do they need to be removed later?
Now as to anesthesia. I don’t recall our discussing it. It is my understanding that these operations can be done with topical anesthetic drops or with injections, which carry substantial additional risks, along with making the eyeball more fixed in position during the operation. What will be the game plan in this case?
And last, The manufacturer and the model and type of the lens in prospect may be of some interest from a financial standpoint. Some of the newer multi-focal accommodating lenses are not fully covered by insurers. Others are. I want to be sure that I am on the same page as my insurance provider before the operation.
Oh, and thank you for going out of your comfort zone on that prescription. I know I took you out of your specialty. You dealt with it and double checked what you were doing. That's one of the things I want in a doctor.
Cordially,
H.C.Benson
Friday, March 02, 2007
Heresy?
When a missionary goes into a primitive land with the backward natives and the daily challenges for survival, he may be quite proud of himself for having taken on the task of bringing the true faith to the ignorant heathen. More souls for the Lord. Of course, I speak of Christian missionaries but the principles apply with all religions and with political and nationalistic or fanatical terrorist groups as well.
These diverse groups of highly committed people have some things in common. They are “true believers” whatever their religious, political, scientific or revolutionary orientation. They may spend considerable time and effort learning the native tongue . This gives the impression that they are acquiring the linguistic skills to become further oriented to the “primitive” community, and developing a better notion of the native society. Although a certain amount of this learning occurs, It does not appear to be the central purpose of learning the language.
The real reason seems to be to better impart the new dogma to the backward savages. The missionary may learn that the naive native believes that the mountain god brings the blessed rain to the jungle. The missionary , without reflection, just knows that this notion is nonsense. He doesn’t even stop to consider it. He is too busy trying to couch scriptures in the native tongue.
And yet, it does not take much thought to realize that mountains impose a barrier to wind, causing updrafts which carry moisture laden clouds high where they will cool and drop the moisture that they contained in the form of rain. So the native “superstition” which seemed so quaint to the missionary held some nuggets of good sense.
It is hard for me to be too hard on the missionaries though, since I recognize that although I am a heretic (some have said a damnable heresiarch) I do advocate a certain open-mindedness with regard to science, philosophy and religion, and sometimes do so with considerable zeal.
One of the reasons missionaries go to strange lands to convert the primitives is that it is so practical. It works so well. They DO achieve significant numbers of converts. The primitives are at a considerable disadvantage, economically, educationally, socially. They are generally second-class in their own minds, and in the missionary’s mind, though he would rarely admit it.
This is what Sunday School is all about as well. Taking advantage of a helpless, powerless and comparatively inexperienced and credulous captive audience; using exceedingly powerful propaganda tools to persuade the little tykes before they are able to defend themselves with any sophistication at all. Young children should not be programmed with religious dogma in the absence of other balancing ideas. We are hardly conscious of this insidious missionary behavior, taking place in our churches continuously. We should be much more conscious of this kind of conditioning.
On the other side of the world in a whole slew of different countries Maddrassa schools do precisely the same sort of conditioning of millions of children who are not able to separate dogma and political propaganda from fact. We have ignored this terroristic tool for decades. Even our allies in the region have these schools operating in large numbers. A rather intractable problem. Any ideas?
These diverse groups of highly committed people have some things in common. They are “true believers” whatever their religious, political, scientific or revolutionary orientation. They may spend considerable time and effort learning the native tongue . This gives the impression that they are acquiring the linguistic skills to become further oriented to the “primitive” community, and developing a better notion of the native society. Although a certain amount of this learning occurs, It does not appear to be the central purpose of learning the language.
The real reason seems to be to better impart the new dogma to the backward savages. The missionary may learn that the naive native believes that the mountain god brings the blessed rain to the jungle. The missionary , without reflection, just knows that this notion is nonsense. He doesn’t even stop to consider it. He is too busy trying to couch scriptures in the native tongue.
And yet, it does not take much thought to realize that mountains impose a barrier to wind, causing updrafts which carry moisture laden clouds high where they will cool and drop the moisture that they contained in the form of rain. So the native “superstition” which seemed so quaint to the missionary held some nuggets of good sense.
It is hard for me to be too hard on the missionaries though, since I recognize that although I am a heretic (some have said a damnable heresiarch) I do advocate a certain open-mindedness with regard to science, philosophy and religion, and sometimes do so with considerable zeal.
One of the reasons missionaries go to strange lands to convert the primitives is that it is so practical. It works so well. They DO achieve significant numbers of converts. The primitives are at a considerable disadvantage, economically, educationally, socially. They are generally second-class in their own minds, and in the missionary’s mind, though he would rarely admit it.
This is what Sunday School is all about as well. Taking advantage of a helpless, powerless and comparatively inexperienced and credulous captive audience; using exceedingly powerful propaganda tools to persuade the little tykes before they are able to defend themselves with any sophistication at all. Young children should not be programmed with religious dogma in the absence of other balancing ideas. We are hardly conscious of this insidious missionary behavior, taking place in our churches continuously. We should be much more conscious of this kind of conditioning.
On the other side of the world in a whole slew of different countries Maddrassa schools do precisely the same sort of conditioning of millions of children who are not able to separate dogma and political propaganda from fact. We have ignored this terroristic tool for decades. Even our allies in the region have these schools operating in large numbers. A rather intractable problem. Any ideas?
Friday, February 23, 2007
Observations On Medicine
When Dr. Benjamin Rush was practicing back in the time of George Washington, he was an extremely well known physician. He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was one of three noted physicians who attended our first President before his demise.
They all bled him. This "accepted medical practice" was not entirely without controversy. Rush was one of the strongest supporters. Perhaps with a few more pints of his own blood left in him, Washington might have survived... Of course that was a couple centuries ago, but even then people still had a slavish devotion to the "experts" who could speak and write Latin phrases and write in secret code to the pharmacists.
But certainly doctors of today are more enlightened. So much new knowledge has accumulated; new devices, new nostrums, new surgical procedures, new protocols. Clearly progress has been made. But there has not been much improvement in the actual practice of medicine.
From what I hear, a typical patient gets perhaps five minutes with a doctor who generally seems from the patients perspective to be quite full of himself and the prevailing medical viewpoints (dogma).
Fifty years ago, there was a widespread medical "fad" called prefrontal lobotomy, done to many thousands of people with irreversible and tragic results. It went on for many years, making vegetables out of otherwise abrasive and annoying human beings.
"Shock treatment" is another procedure which was abusively used as "standard medical practice" on many, many hundreds of thousands of patients on several continents. In many countries, Psychiatric Medicine was, and still is, used as a means of control of dissidents by the all-powerful state.
But enough of this. Pretty unpleasant stuff. Today's enlightened doctors were not involved. And anyway, they are too busy, what with prescribing "paradoxical" stimulants for youngsters with ADD and ADHD, engaging in liposuction, stomach stapling, and installing silicone prostheses (or even giving SILICONE INJECTIONS) for purely cosmetic purposes.
Does anyone seriously believe that the eminent plastic surgeons who hacked Michael Jackson to pieces over several decades were practicing ethically? What they did was "standard medical practice." The foxes are guarding the henhouse.
Back in the early years of the twentieth century a new medical device became available to physicians. They were able, with this device, to treat female hysteria and depression. And my, how well this device worked. It was MANually manipulated with vibrations provided by that newfangled electricity.
These treatments produced the most marvelous and immediate effects on these troubled patients. And for the longest time, the husbands and family of the patients were in the dark as to the details of the treatment. The doctors were held to be miracle workers. Many of these patients went to the doctor several times a month for their hysteria. Nice work if you can get it. Of course these women or their husbands paid for each of these visits. What did that make the doctor? A wh wh wh what?
They all bled him. This "accepted medical practice" was not entirely without controversy. Rush was one of the strongest supporters. Perhaps with a few more pints of his own blood left in him, Washington might have survived... Of course that was a couple centuries ago, but even then people still had a slavish devotion to the "experts" who could speak and write Latin phrases and write in secret code to the pharmacists.
But certainly doctors of today are more enlightened. So much new knowledge has accumulated; new devices, new nostrums, new surgical procedures, new protocols. Clearly progress has been made. But there has not been much improvement in the actual practice of medicine.
From what I hear, a typical patient gets perhaps five minutes with a doctor who generally seems from the patients perspective to be quite full of himself and the prevailing medical viewpoints (dogma).
Fifty years ago, there was a widespread medical "fad" called prefrontal lobotomy, done to many thousands of people with irreversible and tragic results. It went on for many years, making vegetables out of otherwise abrasive and annoying human beings.
"Shock treatment" is another procedure which was abusively used as "standard medical practice" on many, many hundreds of thousands of patients on several continents. In many countries, Psychiatric Medicine was, and still is, used as a means of control of dissidents by the all-powerful state.
But enough of this. Pretty unpleasant stuff. Today's enlightened doctors were not involved. And anyway, they are too busy, what with prescribing "paradoxical" stimulants for youngsters with ADD and ADHD, engaging in liposuction, stomach stapling, and installing silicone prostheses (or even giving SILICONE INJECTIONS) for purely cosmetic purposes.
Does anyone seriously believe that the eminent plastic surgeons who hacked Michael Jackson to pieces over several decades were practicing ethically? What they did was "standard medical practice." The foxes are guarding the henhouse.
Back in the early years of the twentieth century a new medical device became available to physicians. They were able, with this device, to treat female hysteria and depression. And my, how well this device worked. It was MANually manipulated with vibrations provided by that newfangled electricity.
These treatments produced the most marvelous and immediate effects on these troubled patients. And for the longest time, the husbands and family of the patients were in the dark as to the details of the treatment. The doctors were held to be miracle workers. Many of these patients went to the doctor several times a month for their hysteria. Nice work if you can get it. Of course these women or their husbands paid for each of these visits. What did that make the doctor? A wh wh wh what?
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Previous Skin Disorder & Stroke Are Over For Now
My skin is currently treating me pretty well, so I have turned my attention to a variety of other aspects of good health. My interests include: the prevention of viral infections; alternative health processes; fermentation of various beverages; making cheese; baking breads; and the use of microorganisms in human nutrition; teaching chess as a martial art; helping people become more self-reliant; idea development.
I am now a year and a half into rebuilding after a stroke. I have made some substantial gains in recovery. Fortunately my motor skills were not affected. Just the thinking process and memory. Most people haven't noticed these deficits but they are pretty clear to me.
Recently my blood pressure has had some extreme spikes, the worst being 191/110 mm Hg. I am searching for non-allopathic means of control. Aside from these sporadic spikes, I am generally in the normal range.
I have been having some difficulty finding an ophthalmological surgeon to remove and replace the lens of my right eye. Very annoying that they all seem to require that I see an optometrist first. I want no loss in communication between a subcontractor and the surgeon. I see no reason why the surgeon should not do his own workup.
These institutional requirements imposed on patients without regard for the specifics of the situation are counterproductive and, quite simply, wrong. I think my next move will be to find a General Practitioner for my quarter-century checkup. He may be able to get my foot in the door with a referral to a surgical ophthalmologist with a good track record. So time is of the essence in getting my blood pressure under control by means other than pharmaceuticals.
Medication, in my view, should be a last resort, not the first. I really hate firing doctors after a first meeting. But neither can I have my blood pressure bouncing like a ping-pong ball.
As to my idea addiction, there is no cure. If you are an idea addict as well, this is the place to pick up an idea or two, or even add a thought or two of your own.
I am now a year and a half into rebuilding after a stroke. I have made some substantial gains in recovery. Fortunately my motor skills were not affected. Just the thinking process and memory. Most people haven't noticed these deficits but they are pretty clear to me.
Recently my blood pressure has had some extreme spikes, the worst being 191/110 mm Hg. I am searching for non-allopathic means of control. Aside from these sporadic spikes, I am generally in the normal range.
I have been having some difficulty finding an ophthalmological surgeon to remove and replace the lens of my right eye. Very annoying that they all seem to require that I see an optometrist first. I want no loss in communication between a subcontractor and the surgeon. I see no reason why the surgeon should not do his own workup.
These institutional requirements imposed on patients without regard for the specifics of the situation are counterproductive and, quite simply, wrong. I think my next move will be to find a General Practitioner for my quarter-century checkup. He may be able to get my foot in the door with a referral to a surgical ophthalmologist with a good track record. So time is of the essence in getting my blood pressure under control by means other than pharmaceuticals.
Medication, in my view, should be a last resort, not the first. I really hate firing doctors after a first meeting. But neither can I have my blood pressure bouncing like a ping-pong ball.
As to my idea addiction, there is no cure. If you are an idea addict as well, this is the place to pick up an idea or two, or even add a thought or two of your own.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Obscene Entertainment
In a distant place I may not return to
people laughing together with smiley faces
posted words they could not understand
lightly as if they were only lyrics to a song
I won't repeat them though I have more right
than some
but not enough to speak those words
Now away from there I rage still
I am glad I was not silent-
Little children!
Angel of death
is not a song
to party to
words of such atrocities
must be heard
so we don't forget
but never should they pass
the lips of dilettantes
who have not been tortured
beyond all sanity
never by those
who scream for fun
sing and strum
play and jump
these words are
for the broken ones
and those who wouldn't die
don't sing them scream them
say them think them
don't celebrate your innocence
in such a way
with smiley faces
and ignorant laughter
thinking you know
bless fate that you know not
for none can tell
to what red hell
his sightless soul can stray
Hear me!
people laughing together with smiley faces
posted words they could not understand
lightly as if they were only lyrics to a song
I won't repeat them though I have more right
than some
but not enough to speak those words
Now away from there I rage still
I am glad I was not silent-
Little children!
Angel of death
is not a song
to party to
words of such atrocities
must be heard
so we don't forget
but never should they pass
the lips of dilettantes
who have not been tortured
beyond all sanity
never by those
who scream for fun
sing and strum
play and jump
these words are
for the broken ones
and those who wouldn't die
don't sing them scream them
say them think them
don't celebrate your innocence
in such a way
with smiley faces
and ignorant laughter
thinking you know
bless fate that you know not
for none can tell
to what red hell
his sightless soul can stray
Hear me!
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Freedoms
Hello Sal and Rachelle,
I think your concerns are important ones and I share them. It has been said that all politics are local. I think that is true, but it also presents a problem. Those in other areas just aren’t going to get too interested in who gets tracked on toll roads in Texas, nor do they make the connection between this particular abridgement of your rights and the eventual abridgement of theirs.
It is not just the application of a tag tracking device to our vehicles that we need to be concerned about. The truth is, we can all be quite easily tracked to a fairly precise geographic position because we carry cell-phones which emit an identifiable signal even when we are not using them actively. And it won’t be long before all vehicles will have satellite geopositional location devices.
Our trust in the government not to use these powers abusively is not well founded. In recent events we have lost habeas corpus, a very important protection indeed.
It IS important to find the terrorists who threaten our liberty and our lives. But now, the Executive branch can declare literally anyone they wish to be a terrorist suspect and detain them for an unlimited time. Of course the current Executive insists that this power will not be abused, even though no court oversight is currently required.
Abuses of such state powers are not new. Social Security numbers were originally promised to be kept entirely private. That evolved to the extent that they became a universal personal identity number to be used by banks, insurance companies, doctors, dentists, hospitals, schools, and employers as well as local, state and federal enforcement forces. A great many of us have these identity numbers prominently displayed on our checks and on our driver's licenses. Of course it is practical, but it is also a substantial abridgement of our rights to privacy and to be free of unreasonable government surveillance, searches and seizures.
Instances of abuse of such police powers are not few, they are many. And there is no end in sight, because the typical citizen is quite ignorant and apathetic about the loss of these rights, as long as it is happening to “those others.” (the terrorists, the illegal aliens, the pedophiles, the smut peddlers, the atheists, the communists, the fascists, the war resisters, the union organizers, the abortionists and anyone who could be accused of being in sympathy with them.
The very fact that I say these things puts me at potential risk, as soon as the government has time for me. As soon as the wrong bureaucrat notices me. Not because I am an enemy combatant. I am not. Not even because I am a partisan of the subversive philosophies of a hostile foriegn power.
Can or will the Supreme Court protect me? Perhaps. But should I be betting my life and liberty on it? Not at the moment. I don’t really have much choice though. Nor do any of us.
I think your concerns are important ones and I share them. It has been said that all politics are local. I think that is true, but it also presents a problem. Those in other areas just aren’t going to get too interested in who gets tracked on toll roads in Texas, nor do they make the connection between this particular abridgement of your rights and the eventual abridgement of theirs.
It is not just the application of a tag tracking device to our vehicles that we need to be concerned about. The truth is, we can all be quite easily tracked to a fairly precise geographic position because we carry cell-phones which emit an identifiable signal even when we are not using them actively. And it won’t be long before all vehicles will have satellite geopositional location devices.
Our trust in the government not to use these powers abusively is not well founded. In recent events we have lost habeas corpus, a very important protection indeed.
It IS important to find the terrorists who threaten our liberty and our lives. But now, the Executive branch can declare literally anyone they wish to be a terrorist suspect and detain them for an unlimited time. Of course the current Executive insists that this power will not be abused, even though no court oversight is currently required.
Abuses of such state powers are not new. Social Security numbers were originally promised to be kept entirely private. That evolved to the extent that they became a universal personal identity number to be used by banks, insurance companies, doctors, dentists, hospitals, schools, and employers as well as local, state and federal enforcement forces. A great many of us have these identity numbers prominently displayed on our checks and on our driver's licenses. Of course it is practical, but it is also a substantial abridgement of our rights to privacy and to be free of unreasonable government surveillance, searches and seizures.
Instances of abuse of such police powers are not few, they are many. And there is no end in sight, because the typical citizen is quite ignorant and apathetic about the loss of these rights, as long as it is happening to “those others.” (the terrorists, the illegal aliens, the pedophiles, the smut peddlers, the atheists, the communists, the fascists, the war resisters, the union organizers, the abortionists and anyone who could be accused of being in sympathy with them.
The very fact that I say these things puts me at potential risk, as soon as the government has time for me. As soon as the wrong bureaucrat notices me. Not because I am an enemy combatant. I am not. Not even because I am a partisan of the subversive philosophies of a hostile foriegn power.
Can or will the Supreme Court protect me? Perhaps. But should I be betting my life and liberty on it? Not at the moment. I don’t really have much choice though. Nor do any of us.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
An Idea About Taxes
It seems to me that it might possible to have an entirely voluntary system of taxation but that it would be likely to be under-funded for even the most minimal set of services to be supplied by government. People in general simply wish to pay as few taxes as they can. But involuntary taxation opens the way to an unlimitedly rapacious government squandering resources until an inevitable economic collapse. History is replete with examples.
Even in representative forms of government in which elected officials allocate and redistribute the wealth and determine who gets taxed how much, and for what, the problem remains. The representatives only seem to represent their electorate. Once they attain power, in large numbers, they become predators of the very flock they swore to represent.
Yet, it is easy to see that the average citizen is either too incompetent or unwilling to engage in the effort to determine the direction of the resources he contributes to the functioning of the body politic.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that a small part of the population, like a tenth, have both the desire and the intelligence to make reasonable decisions as to the allocation of their particular resources, which have been drafted for the good of the system. This would constitute an additional substantial buffer against the abuses currently taking place in the typical representative democracy. In prior times, the practical logistics would have made it impossible. In the age of the computer it is not.
These individuals would contribute to resources to the same extent as their fellow citizens, but would take on the additional responsibility of directing those funds to the particular branches of government and services that they believe are worthiest of funding, and excluding those areas they believe are over funded or destructive to the general good.
We would not now have a utopia, but certainly that extra substantial block of decision makers would be an additional buffer against the abuses which now seem so rampant in national governmental structures.
Even in representative forms of government in which elected officials allocate and redistribute the wealth and determine who gets taxed how much, and for what, the problem remains. The representatives only seem to represent their electorate. Once they attain power, in large numbers, they become predators of the very flock they swore to represent.
Yet, it is easy to see that the average citizen is either too incompetent or unwilling to engage in the effort to determine the direction of the resources he contributes to the functioning of the body politic.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that a small part of the population, like a tenth, have both the desire and the intelligence to make reasonable decisions as to the allocation of their particular resources, which have been drafted for the good of the system. This would constitute an additional substantial buffer against the abuses currently taking place in the typical representative democracy. In prior times, the practical logistics would have made it impossible. In the age of the computer it is not.
These individuals would contribute to resources to the same extent as their fellow citizens, but would take on the additional responsibility of directing those funds to the particular branches of government and services that they believe are worthiest of funding, and excluding those areas they believe are over funded or destructive to the general good.
We would not now have a utopia, but certainly that extra substantial block of decision makers would be an additional buffer against the abuses which now seem so rampant in national governmental structures.
Monday, January 15, 2007
War, Chess, and Medicine
I am provocative in a variety of ways. We learn everything better when we are fully engaged. When I teach chess, 90% of it is by combat. I give very few tutorials to the group. Lectures are often dull, dry and lifeless. I pose questions and generate problems with a point. I challenge the group to think. My class is a participatory event. My private sessions are even more vigorous.
One thing I have noticed in my group classes, is that the thinking process of an opponent is clearly different than that of the spectators. The opponent is much more fully engaged, focused. The spectators, even though many of them are in the lineup, waiting for their turn at combat, often "zone out" or chat idly with one another.
I would characterize most of the people on the Internet in much the same way. Mostly they are just "goofing around." They rarely are diligently trying to accomplish something of any importance or value. Perhaps this comes from our experiences as passive members of the audience when we watch movies. And when we watch TV matters are even worse, since about a third of the time is spent wading through a cesspool of commercials. There is no better encouragement to tune out than hearing the same repetitive nonsense ad infinitum.
For me, it is particularly irritating, since I pay $130 a month for my cable service without even being provided with cable Internet. And the HDTV programming provided is not compelling and is replete with technical defects, continuously freeze framing, pixelating, losing audio, etc. often dozens of times per hour. What is worse, Sudden Link broadcasts frequent commercials lauding how great they are. And, speaking of commercials, we now get more per hour than ever before, even though we are paying so much for the service, instead of getting the programming for free, as was the case before the cable and satellite companies. The cable company also sells program length commercials called "paid programs." These paid programs often clutter the "premium channels" which we have paid extra to get.
Other SuddenLink customers or those with other cable providers who have similar issues are welcome to post their comments here. I will start a whole separate Rant section for them if necessary.
I got one of SuddenLink's "technicians" out to try to shape things up. When I told him of one of the defects; the fact that I often totally lose audio and don't get it back until I change the channel and then change back. What did he say? "Yup. Can't do anything about that. Everybody with an HD box is having the same problem." That was the entire extent of the service that this fellow provided. How are you people with satellite service doing? Let me know. I don't want to jump from the frying pan only to wind up in the fire.
Skin Cell Forum has been around for several years. I stumbled on it last year when I was having some problems with my skin. I found the forum quite helpful and showed my appreciation by becoming pretty fully engaged with them. I have made over 700 posts there, some of them whimsical or controversial, but usually just helping people deal with their problems.
But look at the rest of the membership. Of the more than 11,000 members, at least 75% have made 0 to 5 posts. They are lurking, glazed over, in a fog, Peeping Tom's. Now if we look at the number who actually post things, but do so in a slapdash fashion, without a scintilla of thought, or providing downright dangerous advice, the situation is even sadder. It is a very small handful of dedicated people who make that forum a worthwhile place. The others are just littering or pleading for the help of others while being unwilling to do much to help themselves.
But getting back to chess. It is not just a game. It is martial arts for the mind. As a symbolic analogue of combat, it has great value in getting the mind in better shape to do important things in virtually any field. And it is certainly better for this purpose than the usual fare of video war games.
I do not teach people how to do things if I can teach them how to discover how to do them when they have the felt need to do so. Our own assumptions and preconceptions about things often blind us to important things in the real world. Sometimes I have students who will get stuck on a "plateau" and are dismayed because they can't discern any real progress in their game. Why can't I just make them better and better little by little every week? That's NOT how it works. We all have times when progress is not apparent.
I have been teaching chess for fifty years now. I had a stroke almost a year and a half ago that initially cost me 25 to 40 IQ points. This had substantial impact on my chess. For a while, I was losing a lot of games to my most ruthless and skilled students. That helped me determine the extent, approximate location of the brain damage, and the probable best course of action in dealing with it. For their part, most of my best students were delighted with my sudden vulnerability. I did lose a few students who apparently came to the conclusion that because I was damaged, I was no longer worthy of being their teacher. Good riddance to them! I won't have them back at any price. One of them comes sniffing around now and then. Bah!
I don't make my students better. I only point the way, or better yet, challenge them to find the way for themselves. I entertain, I cajole, I challenge, I make lame-brained mistakes purposely on the board for them to discover. Then I point them out immediately when they are not seen. When they are found, I congratulate my opponent and fight hard to regain my lost Queen or scramble out of the mating net that I have gotten myself into. This teaches them not to give up, even after suffering a major setback. I have lost count of the games that were certain to be lost which were made into draws or wins. I take risks. And I lose some games. Also, I teach by analogy and relate strategy and tactics to philosophy, the sciences, and real life.
What I do NOT encourage is the memorization of various lines and Openings. There is nothing creative about remembering various strings of moves. The important thing is knowing WHY the moves are made.
My thoughts about the First and Second World Wars and all the other disastrous conflicts in recent history, tend to come down on the side of finding better ways of resolving our conflicts than war. That does not mean that I do not realize that war has also been the motivating force for great discoveries which have changed the course of human destiny. Certainly we should not lose sight of the fact that the trillions we have spent in raging hostilities during the twentieth century have also brought about innovation and invention beyond our capacity to comprehend. Certainly one could make the case that that we might not have landed on the moon. Our daily lives have been transformed with all of the wonders that have come out of the advances in all the sciences. These are not good enough reasons to fight modern wars.
IN 1962, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OUR EXISTENCE, OUR SPECIES HAD THE CAPABILITY OF DESTROYING THE PLANET AND ALL LIFE ON IT. WE CAME WITHIN A HAIR'S BREADTH OF DOING SO! MOST OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE I TALK TO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. EVEN PEOPLE MY AGE NO LONGER REMEMBER, OR WERE NOT CONSCIOUS AT THE TIME, OF HOW CLOSE WE CAME TO TOTAL ANNIHILATION.
Could we perhaps have done even better if we had been more cooperative with one another internationally along the way? Should we just be patting each other complacently on the back when we "win" an international conflict, idiotically applauding our success?
Our Alpha leader told us three weeks after our precipitous invasion of Iraq that we had won. A Pollyanna approach is not just dangerous, it is disaster. Leaving aside these deliberate fanatic insanities, pandemics, tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes and cyclones will all continue to occur on an increasingly crowded planet which increasingly has dwindling resources to deal with them.
In my lifespan the human population has more than tripled. Our disaster systems are a disaster in themselves. They now fail in bigger ways than ever before and they fail more and more often. Should we not minimize our own production of disaster? And should we not divert our resources to more beneficial activities that salvage and repair rather than destroy?
By current reckoning, Americans are on the hook for almost half a trillion dollars for just this current imbecilic war. That's TRILLION. That is just what has been squandered so far. It does not account for the costs of caring for our permanently wounded.
The current administration now has a new generation of nuclear weapons in the works. I am steadfast in my resolve not to call our chief leaders idiots. Wouldn't be prudent. Particularly since habeas corpus is no longer currently a protection. Our leaders have shown that they can skillfully run our country into the ground with their eyes tightly closed. Leaving aside the monumental waste, widespread corruption, fraud and outright theft, what have we gotten in return? More stability in the Middle East? No, things in the region are more volatile and less predictable.
And yet throughout the world, in spite of what we should all have learned from history, there are virtually no major nations who do not spend more on preparations for war than they do on anything else. Considering all of our other problems, this "defense" spending is indefensible.
Okay, my blood pressure needs some attention. I am going to just change the subject for now.
Let me say a word about medicine and doctors. I am not sanguine about how they are doing. I am not alone in this perspective. Even so, looking through my previous posts on Skin Cell Forum,I notice I have encouraged people to be forthright with their doctors, to be as complete as possible in the information they give them. I have even suggested, now and then, that someone go to the doctor.
One of my sons, an extremely successful teacher in his own right, suggests that I am unduly focused on what doctors and politicians collectively do wrong. There is some merit in his perspective. But the fact is, the failings are much more important to talk about than the successes. Both doctors and politicians blow their own horns quite nicely without my additional help.
I have made some caustic remarks about the specific ACTIONS of two dentists, which I believe were designed to benefit them, to my great detriment. More specific details on this subject can be found on Skin Cell Forum in the General Health Section on the thread called Biting the Dentist.
In both cases, I said nothing about them that I would retract in their presence. Indeed, I have been circumspect. I am quite angry enough with them to post their names. I have not done so. Do they have the opportunity to defend themselves? The most recent one does. He knows the name Anthropositor. He knows that I participate in Skin Cell Forum. I taught him and some members of his staff how to prevent viral infection. I did so without charge I might add, in spite of the bald-faced profiteering of this particular dentist. I am prepared to debate the matter in any venue at any time.
There are important things wrong with many doctors and the way they practice medicine. Medical systems, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry/government subsidy systems are in many ways out of whack. We need them. We need to fix them. I for one, would be quite pleased if any doctor showed up here to share his wisdom with us. If a doctor showed up here, I would be of the opinion that he was a part of the solution, more than being a part of the problem. None ever do seem to show up in any of these venues. I think that is significant. They feel quite above it all. As time goes on I will be saying more about the devolution of medicine and the alternatives we have open to us if we are capable and have the courage to implement them.
Thanks to all the doctors who save lives and make the lives of their patients better. Thanks especially to the ones that retain their humanity along the way. And thanks most of all to the mavericks among you who think more of the patients than scientific dogma and dollars. No one is in a better position to make things better. I would be overjoyed if any of you came here to share your views. I'll help as best I can.
Thinking back, I realize that I have not been to an optometrist for fifty years or other doctor for twenty-five. Of course I do not advocate that kind of extended period for others. For me it has worked out to my entire satisfaction.
As to dentists, in the past ten years I have been to four dentists. One pleased me greatly with his services, his skills and his ethics. I believe I have recommended him to at least a hundred people. Another, I have no strong feelings about at all. The remaining two did me intrinsic injury. I have made my feelings known to them and to others. I will continue to do so, particularly with the most recent one.
Now I have a well-developed cataract in my right eye. I will need the services of a skilled ophthalmological surgeon. I will need to weigh the respective advantages of a polymethyl acrylate or a silicone replacement lens. I will need to consult on such matters as using a symmetrical lens (advantage: if it changes rotational position, there will be no effect on the vision that will need additional surgical intervention), or a bifocal implant (which would need some haptics to maintain it's orientation and might have some complications later). The most challenging prospect I have facing me right now is the selection of the appropriate surgeon. I will let you know if I am able to interview any candidates for even five minutes prior to committing myself to their services. It does not seem unreasonable to me to require this for something that is going to cost several thousands of dollars per hour of actual work
One thing I have noticed in my group classes, is that the thinking process of an opponent is clearly different than that of the spectators. The opponent is much more fully engaged, focused. The spectators, even though many of them are in the lineup, waiting for their turn at combat, often "zone out" or chat idly with one another.
I would characterize most of the people on the Internet in much the same way. Mostly they are just "goofing around." They rarely are diligently trying to accomplish something of any importance or value. Perhaps this comes from our experiences as passive members of the audience when we watch movies. And when we watch TV matters are even worse, since about a third of the time is spent wading through a cesspool of commercials. There is no better encouragement to tune out than hearing the same repetitive nonsense ad infinitum.
For me, it is particularly irritating, since I pay $130 a month for my cable service without even being provided with cable Internet. And the HDTV programming provided is not compelling and is replete with technical defects, continuously freeze framing, pixelating, losing audio, etc. often dozens of times per hour. What is worse, Sudden Link broadcasts frequent commercials lauding how great they are. And, speaking of commercials, we now get more per hour than ever before, even though we are paying so much for the service, instead of getting the programming for free, as was the case before the cable and satellite companies. The cable company also sells program length commercials called "paid programs." These paid programs often clutter the "premium channels" which we have paid extra to get.
Other SuddenLink customers or those with other cable providers who have similar issues are welcome to post their comments here. I will start a whole separate Rant section for them if necessary.
I got one of SuddenLink's "technicians" out to try to shape things up. When I told him of one of the defects; the fact that I often totally lose audio and don't get it back until I change the channel and then change back. What did he say? "Yup. Can't do anything about that. Everybody with an HD box is having the same problem." That was the entire extent of the service that this fellow provided. How are you people with satellite service doing? Let me know. I don't want to jump from the frying pan only to wind up in the fire.
Skin Cell Forum has been around for several years. I stumbled on it last year when I was having some problems with my skin. I found the forum quite helpful and showed my appreciation by becoming pretty fully engaged with them. I have made over 700 posts there, some of them whimsical or controversial, but usually just helping people deal with their problems.
But look at the rest of the membership. Of the more than 11,000 members, at least 75% have made 0 to 5 posts. They are lurking, glazed over, in a fog, Peeping Tom's. Now if we look at the number who actually post things, but do so in a slapdash fashion, without a scintilla of thought, or providing downright dangerous advice, the situation is even sadder. It is a very small handful of dedicated people who make that forum a worthwhile place. The others are just littering or pleading for the help of others while being unwilling to do much to help themselves.
But getting back to chess. It is not just a game. It is martial arts for the mind. As a symbolic analogue of combat, it has great value in getting the mind in better shape to do important things in virtually any field. And it is certainly better for this purpose than the usual fare of video war games.
I do not teach people how to do things if I can teach them how to discover how to do them when they have the felt need to do so. Our own assumptions and preconceptions about things often blind us to important things in the real world. Sometimes I have students who will get stuck on a "plateau" and are dismayed because they can't discern any real progress in their game. Why can't I just make them better and better little by little every week? That's NOT how it works. We all have times when progress is not apparent.
I have been teaching chess for fifty years now. I had a stroke almost a year and a half ago that initially cost me 25 to 40 IQ points. This had substantial impact on my chess. For a while, I was losing a lot of games to my most ruthless and skilled students. That helped me determine the extent, approximate location of the brain damage, and the probable best course of action in dealing with it. For their part, most of my best students were delighted with my sudden vulnerability. I did lose a few students who apparently came to the conclusion that because I was damaged, I was no longer worthy of being their teacher. Good riddance to them! I won't have them back at any price. One of them comes sniffing around now and then. Bah!
I don't make my students better. I only point the way, or better yet, challenge them to find the way for themselves. I entertain, I cajole, I challenge, I make lame-brained mistakes purposely on the board for them to discover. Then I point them out immediately when they are not seen. When they are found, I congratulate my opponent and fight hard to regain my lost Queen or scramble out of the mating net that I have gotten myself into. This teaches them not to give up, even after suffering a major setback. I have lost count of the games that were certain to be lost which were made into draws or wins. I take risks. And I lose some games. Also, I teach by analogy and relate strategy and tactics to philosophy, the sciences, and real life.
What I do NOT encourage is the memorization of various lines and Openings. There is nothing creative about remembering various strings of moves. The important thing is knowing WHY the moves are made.
My thoughts about the First and Second World Wars and all the other disastrous conflicts in recent history, tend to come down on the side of finding better ways of resolving our conflicts than war. That does not mean that I do not realize that war has also been the motivating force for great discoveries which have changed the course of human destiny. Certainly we should not lose sight of the fact that the trillions we have spent in raging hostilities during the twentieth century have also brought about innovation and invention beyond our capacity to comprehend. Certainly one could make the case that that we might not have landed on the moon. Our daily lives have been transformed with all of the wonders that have come out of the advances in all the sciences. These are not good enough reasons to fight modern wars.
IN 1962, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OUR EXISTENCE, OUR SPECIES HAD THE CAPABILITY OF DESTROYING THE PLANET AND ALL LIFE ON IT. WE CAME WITHIN A HAIR'S BREADTH OF DOING SO! MOST OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE I TALK TO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. EVEN PEOPLE MY AGE NO LONGER REMEMBER, OR WERE NOT CONSCIOUS AT THE TIME, OF HOW CLOSE WE CAME TO TOTAL ANNIHILATION.
Could we perhaps have done even better if we had been more cooperative with one another internationally along the way? Should we just be patting each other complacently on the back when we "win" an international conflict, idiotically applauding our success?
Our Alpha leader told us three weeks after our precipitous invasion of Iraq that we had won. A Pollyanna approach is not just dangerous, it is disaster. Leaving aside these deliberate fanatic insanities, pandemics, tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes and cyclones will all continue to occur on an increasingly crowded planet which increasingly has dwindling resources to deal with them.
In my lifespan the human population has more than tripled. Our disaster systems are a disaster in themselves. They now fail in bigger ways than ever before and they fail more and more often. Should we not minimize our own production of disaster? And should we not divert our resources to more beneficial activities that salvage and repair rather than destroy?
By current reckoning, Americans are on the hook for almost half a trillion dollars for just this current imbecilic war. That's TRILLION. That is just what has been squandered so far. It does not account for the costs of caring for our permanently wounded.
The current administration now has a new generation of nuclear weapons in the works. I am steadfast in my resolve not to call our chief leaders idiots. Wouldn't be prudent. Particularly since habeas corpus is no longer currently a protection. Our leaders have shown that they can skillfully run our country into the ground with their eyes tightly closed. Leaving aside the monumental waste, widespread corruption, fraud and outright theft, what have we gotten in return? More stability in the Middle East? No, things in the region are more volatile and less predictable.
And yet throughout the world, in spite of what we should all have learned from history, there are virtually no major nations who do not spend more on preparations for war than they do on anything else. Considering all of our other problems, this "defense" spending is indefensible.
Okay, my blood pressure needs some attention. I am going to just change the subject for now.
Let me say a word about medicine and doctors. I am not sanguine about how they are doing. I am not alone in this perspective. Even so, looking through my previous posts on Skin Cell Forum,I notice I have encouraged people to be forthright with their doctors, to be as complete as possible in the information they give them. I have even suggested, now and then, that someone go to the doctor.
One of my sons, an extremely successful teacher in his own right, suggests that I am unduly focused on what doctors and politicians collectively do wrong. There is some merit in his perspective. But the fact is, the failings are much more important to talk about than the successes. Both doctors and politicians blow their own horns quite nicely without my additional help.
I have made some caustic remarks about the specific ACTIONS of two dentists, which I believe were designed to benefit them, to my great detriment. More specific details on this subject can be found on Skin Cell Forum in the General Health Section on the thread called Biting the Dentist.
In both cases, I said nothing about them that I would retract in their presence. Indeed, I have been circumspect. I am quite angry enough with them to post their names. I have not done so. Do they have the opportunity to defend themselves? The most recent one does. He knows the name Anthropositor. He knows that I participate in Skin Cell Forum. I taught him and some members of his staff how to prevent viral infection. I did so without charge I might add, in spite of the bald-faced profiteering of this particular dentist. I am prepared to debate the matter in any venue at any time.
There are important things wrong with many doctors and the way they practice medicine. Medical systems, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry/government subsidy systems are in many ways out of whack. We need them. We need to fix them. I for one, would be quite pleased if any doctor showed up here to share his wisdom with us. If a doctor showed up here, I would be of the opinion that he was a part of the solution, more than being a part of the problem. None ever do seem to show up in any of these venues. I think that is significant. They feel quite above it all. As time goes on I will be saying more about the devolution of medicine and the alternatives we have open to us if we are capable and have the courage to implement them.
Thanks to all the doctors who save lives and make the lives of their patients better. Thanks especially to the ones that retain their humanity along the way. And thanks most of all to the mavericks among you who think more of the patients than scientific dogma and dollars. No one is in a better position to make things better. I would be overjoyed if any of you came here to share your views. I'll help as best I can.
Thinking back, I realize that I have not been to an optometrist for fifty years or other doctor for twenty-five. Of course I do not advocate that kind of extended period for others. For me it has worked out to my entire satisfaction.
As to dentists, in the past ten years I have been to four dentists. One pleased me greatly with his services, his skills and his ethics. I believe I have recommended him to at least a hundred people. Another, I have no strong feelings about at all. The remaining two did me intrinsic injury. I have made my feelings known to them and to others. I will continue to do so, particularly with the most recent one.
Now I have a well-developed cataract in my right eye. I will need the services of a skilled ophthalmological surgeon. I will need to weigh the respective advantages of a polymethyl acrylate or a silicone replacement lens. I will need to consult on such matters as using a symmetrical lens (advantage: if it changes rotational position, there will be no effect on the vision that will need additional surgical intervention), or a bifocal implant (which would need some haptics to maintain it's orientation and might have some complications later). The most challenging prospect I have facing me right now is the selection of the appropriate surgeon. I will let you know if I am able to interview any candidates for even five minutes prior to committing myself to their services. It does not seem unreasonable to me to require this for something that is going to cost several thousands of dollars per hour of actual work
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Present and Future Pandemics
Currently H5N1 (avian flu) is not demonstrably transmissible from human to human. It is widespread in various populations of wild birds and is a major threat to overcrowded farmed populations of chickens and ducks throughout the world. But it would be unwise for us to be complacent about this. A prominent element of viruses, including the influenza's and rhino viruses (which cause the common cold), is that they often mutate, and in the process, become more virulent or move to new species not previously affected. That possibility is the main concern here.
Another concern is that the various health organizations like WHO and the CDC and national authorities accross the world are currently focused on killing entire populations of farmed birds if isolated infections occur. This gives the farmers some considerable incentive to fail to report disease in their flocks and is, in the end, counterproductive in a variety of ways. It is also unfortunate that we are betting on the possibility of developing a vaccine that can be produced industrially within a short enough time-frame to be useful to more than a few percent of the world population, if the virus were to mutate to a form which was not only virulent, but easily transmissible from human to human.
As far as I know, no public health agency is doing much of anything to investigate better methods of prophylaxis for viruses in general. Furthermore, the authorities often impede progress in this area by the exclusionary and myopic way grants for research are issued.
I also know, with a considerable degree of certainty, that gauze masks and the like are not an effective prophylactic measure. I also know that other methods in this area work quite well. I know this because I haven't had a cold or bout of flu since 1984 and there are now thousands of other people who now have a similar record of being free of these viruses since as far back as 1990 (when I began teaching others how to protect themselves).
My motive in life is not to accumulate a lot of money. (I have never made a dime for many thousands of hours of research and dissemination of the Prevention Procedure). I have never applied for a research grant, and do not intend to. Even now, while recovering from a stroke, I will present or debate the subject in any venue which gives the chance of teaching new people how and why to engage in a process of protection, which, if done consistently, will afford them a high degree of protection even in the event of a pandemic. I impede no one if they wish to quote me, as long as they are accurate, complete and give me proper attribution, so that people can check with me if questions arise.
If I have any regrets, they are that I did not spend another 10,000 hours doing what I have been doing. On the other hand, from the first moment someone speculated on the idea that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, it was nineteen years before the notion was accepted as fact. In that time many, many thousands of people died because of fallacious ideas held by the authorities. And of course the AIDS crisis is considerably worse today because of the inept and ill-advised response by the authorities throughout the years.
Another concern is that the various health organizations like WHO and the CDC and national authorities accross the world are currently focused on killing entire populations of farmed birds if isolated infections occur. This gives the farmers some considerable incentive to fail to report disease in their flocks and is, in the end, counterproductive in a variety of ways. It is also unfortunate that we are betting on the possibility of developing a vaccine that can be produced industrially within a short enough time-frame to be useful to more than a few percent of the world population, if the virus were to mutate to a form which was not only virulent, but easily transmissible from human to human.
As far as I know, no public health agency is doing much of anything to investigate better methods of prophylaxis for viruses in general. Furthermore, the authorities often impede progress in this area by the exclusionary and myopic way grants for research are issued.
I also know, with a considerable degree of certainty, that gauze masks and the like are not an effective prophylactic measure. I also know that other methods in this area work quite well. I know this because I haven't had a cold or bout of flu since 1984 and there are now thousands of other people who now have a similar record of being free of these viruses since as far back as 1990 (when I began teaching others how to protect themselves).
My motive in life is not to accumulate a lot of money. (I have never made a dime for many thousands of hours of research and dissemination of the Prevention Procedure). I have never applied for a research grant, and do not intend to. Even now, while recovering from a stroke, I will present or debate the subject in any venue which gives the chance of teaching new people how and why to engage in a process of protection, which, if done consistently, will afford them a high degree of protection even in the event of a pandemic. I impede no one if they wish to quote me, as long as they are accurate, complete and give me proper attribution, so that people can check with me if questions arise.
If I have any regrets, they are that I did not spend another 10,000 hours doing what I have been doing. On the other hand, from the first moment someone speculated on the idea that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, it was nineteen years before the notion was accepted as fact. In that time many, many thousands of people died because of fallacious ideas held by the authorities. And of course the AIDS crisis is considerably worse today because of the inept and ill-advised response by the authorities throughout the years.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Micro-organisms in Health
Soon we will be talking about some ideas relating to fermentation and the value of micro-organisms in human health and nutrition. But my next post will focus on prevention of viruses and reducing allergic reactions. My approach as a general rule is observational, experimental, and speculative rather than entirely rigorous, tightly controlled and with documented results. But the Viral and Allergy Protection is now well proven and established. The results are outstanding and clear cut. If colds and flu and allergies are making you miserable each year, put off the rest of this thread for now and go to Prevention of Viruses.
We have been pretty pervasively conditioned to an extreme dislike and mistrust of organisms at the microscopic scale. We call them GERMS. We overlook all the good that they do. In terms of numbers, pathological organisms represent a minuscule portion of the microscopic domain.
The differences between the industrially produced wines and the natural ferments are great and may be of considerable importance. While a lot of people are brewing their own beer and making their own wines, not too many are looking at it from this perspective, and they usually use commercial yeast for the purpose. In my fermented beverages I use only wild yeasts. No commercial fungi or bacteria either. I have consumed most of the industrially supplied organisms in substantial amounts, for many years, in such things as yogurt and kefir and acidophilus milk and various cheeses, and did not stop doing so for the duration of this ongoing experiment. The so-called "probiotics" need not be purchased at inflated prices to get the nutritional benefits. Making your own yogurt, clabber or kefir is extremly easy.
In the past few months, I have done some experimental fermentation of such things as coffee, tea, purple grape juice and apple cider. In my production of these drinks, made generally a gallon at a time, I used only the wild organisms from the ambient air.
During this time, I have deliberately loaded up my system with these ferments, with a view to determining if dangers to health began to appear. The point is, if mistakes are easy to make and the average guy on the street might easily hurt himself fermenting while using reasonable methods and care, then it is not something I want to encourage other people to do.
As I write this I am eating a bowl of chilled stewed cranberries combined with raisins which have been fermenting for about a month. An hour or so ago I had a tall glass of fermented green tea mixed with Hard cider. It was entirely unfiltered, leaving the glass with a thin layer of whitish residue, a remainder of the wild yeasts and perhaps other airborne bacteria that grew during the fermentation. I even made some cheeses for the same purpose, also only using wild organisms, except for one batch which included a gram of chevre (goat cheese) culture. That had one notable side-effect. I ate a lot of it. I think it was mostly the cheese that caused me to gain perhaps ten pounds over the past few months. I have now reduced my intake.
All this fermentation is quite new to me and I am learning as I go along. But I have found that most of my efforts have turned out well. In the few batches that developed minor problems, I used only my own senses to detect them. No testing devices or instruments. I haven't even measured pH. I simply started with liquids I knew to be on the acidic side of the pH scale for wine.
Later on, I will be producing some sourdough starter for baking breads. The principle is the same but it will be on it's own thread because these yeasts and other organisms are not ultimately consumed while living. Here the objective was deliberately to load the diet with the live yeasts to determine their impacts on health and nutrition.
Anybody with any questions or comments so far? Or opinions, speculations or ideas?
We have been pretty pervasively conditioned to an extreme dislike and mistrust of organisms at the microscopic scale. We call them GERMS. We overlook all the good that they do. In terms of numbers, pathological organisms represent a minuscule portion of the microscopic domain.
The differences between the industrially produced wines and the natural ferments are great and may be of considerable importance. While a lot of people are brewing their own beer and making their own wines, not too many are looking at it from this perspective, and they usually use commercial yeast for the purpose. In my fermented beverages I use only wild yeasts. No commercial fungi or bacteria either. I have consumed most of the industrially supplied organisms in substantial amounts, for many years, in such things as yogurt and kefir and acidophilus milk and various cheeses, and did not stop doing so for the duration of this ongoing experiment. The so-called "probiotics" need not be purchased at inflated prices to get the nutritional benefits. Making your own yogurt, clabber or kefir is extremly easy.
In the past few months, I have done some experimental fermentation of such things as coffee, tea, purple grape juice and apple cider. In my production of these drinks, made generally a gallon at a time, I used only the wild organisms from the ambient air.
During this time, I have deliberately loaded up my system with these ferments, with a view to determining if dangers to health began to appear. The point is, if mistakes are easy to make and the average guy on the street might easily hurt himself fermenting while using reasonable methods and care, then it is not something I want to encourage other people to do.
As I write this I am eating a bowl of chilled stewed cranberries combined with raisins which have been fermenting for about a month. An hour or so ago I had a tall glass of fermented green tea mixed with Hard cider. It was entirely unfiltered, leaving the glass with a thin layer of whitish residue, a remainder of the wild yeasts and perhaps other airborne bacteria that grew during the fermentation. I even made some cheeses for the same purpose, also only using wild organisms, except for one batch which included a gram of chevre (goat cheese) culture. That had one notable side-effect. I ate a lot of it. I think it was mostly the cheese that caused me to gain perhaps ten pounds over the past few months. I have now reduced my intake.
All this fermentation is quite new to me and I am learning as I go along. But I have found that most of my efforts have turned out well. In the few batches that developed minor problems, I used only my own senses to detect them. No testing devices or instruments. I haven't even measured pH. I simply started with liquids I knew to be on the acidic side of the pH scale for wine.
Later on, I will be producing some sourdough starter for baking breads. The principle is the same but it will be on it's own thread because these yeasts and other organisms are not ultimately consumed while living. Here the objective was deliberately to load the diet with the live yeasts to determine their impacts on health and nutrition.
Anybody with any questions or comments so far? Or opinions, speculations or ideas?
Ideas Too Formless to Share Widely
It occurs to me that some of you have ideas still in the formative stage, not ready for publication, brainstorming, debate or testing. Under those circumstances of course, just send me a private E-mail: eurekaideas@centurytel.net
What's the big idea?
Hi. This is a new blog today (1-11-07). I will be putting up some things in the next few days. Meanwhile, please leave your name and say something interesting. Put Anthropositor in your search engine to find out more! Some of the things on the agenda are Prevention of Viral Infections, Climate Change, and Crises of Conflict.
On the longer term, we will also be talking about alternatives to the choices currently presented by the medical/pharmaceutical/industrial establishment. The method of preventing virus infection is the first thing presented. Substantially reducing allergic reactions to airborne allergens is a significant side effect of that procedure. These are no longer speculative ideas. They have been tested quite thoroughly by a great many people. They work. All that is required is that you do them as outlined. Regularly.
Some of the other things on the agenda are considerably more complex and will require real stamina and study and mental effort to master. As in anything else, the rewards will be greatest for those who do the best work and attain the greatest understanding. The two fields next up are Herbal Medicine and Enzymes. Of course, there is always the chance that someone will persuade me that there is even more compelling subject matter to investigate.
We might even talk about tactics and strategy once in a while, along with goals and objectives.
What's the big idea? Well, don't just sit there... say something.
All Blog contents copyright © 2007 by H.C.Benson.All posts on this blog are deemed to have copyright protection by publication. Check with me before publishing them elsewhere without proper attribution. Write to: Anthropositor eurekaideas@centurytel.net
On the longer term, we will also be talking about alternatives to the choices currently presented by the medical/pharmaceutical/industrial establishment. The method of preventing virus infection is the first thing presented. Substantially reducing allergic reactions to airborne allergens is a significant side effect of that procedure. These are no longer speculative ideas. They have been tested quite thoroughly by a great many people. They work. All that is required is that you do them as outlined. Regularly.
Some of the other things on the agenda are considerably more complex and will require real stamina and study and mental effort to master. As in anything else, the rewards will be greatest for those who do the best work and attain the greatest understanding. The two fields next up are Herbal Medicine and Enzymes. Of course, there is always the chance that someone will persuade me that there is even more compelling subject matter to investigate.
We might even talk about tactics and strategy once in a while, along with goals and objectives.
What's the big idea? Well, don't just sit there... say something.
All Blog contents copyright © 2007 by H.C.Benson.All posts on this blog are deemed to have copyright protection by publication. Check with me before publishing them elsewhere without proper attribution. Write to: Anthropositor eurekaideas@centurytel.net
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